Singapore Comix

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

So the Angouleme Comic Festival 2015 ended earlier this month. Last year’s Grand Prix winner, Bill Waterson did not make an appearance but he did draw a touching comic strip about the comics. This year’s Grand Prix winner was Katsuhiro Otomo, who was also one of the finalist for 2014. Here’s some nice pics of Angouleme this year. Gosh, I miss the food.

I made it to Angouleme in 2014 and wrote a report for the International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA). A version of this appeared in the Vol 16, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2014 issue.

A First Timer’s Visit to Angoulême (30 January to 2 February 2014)

A stint in the UK has given me the chance to visit the Angoulême Comics Festival, Europe’s largest comic festival, for the first time. Being the centennial of the start of the First World War, a strong sense of history dominated the festival, which appeals to me as a history teacher. But it was another historical controversy from the Second World War that grabbed the headlines.

IJOCA readers may have known about the Korean comfort women manhwa exhibition put up at this year’s Angouleme. Much has been written about it and the AFP story has made its rounds in Asian and Southeast Asian newspapers. It was Korean soft power at work to punish Japan diplomatically, in the comics field which Japanese manga has dominated for the last 15 years. Korea has protested to the UN about the issue of Korean sex slavery in Japanese military units during the Second World War. Now it has taken the battle to France in an attempt to open a second cultural front. But it is a longer conflict than that (Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945), one that stretches to the present day.

While in 1993, Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono had apologized to former comfort women and acknowledged Japan's role in causing their suffering, in 2007, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said there was no evidence that Japan directly forced women to work as sex slaves. In 2013, Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto made a similar statement. In a public statement, Korea's Gender Equality and Family Minister Cho Yoon-sun made it clear that the exhibition was to show the world the cruelty Japan had inflicted on Korean comfort women. It had a political agenda, not just a cultural one.

On 30 January 2014 (the first day of the festival), Flowers That Never Fade, opened to much fanfare with Cho officiating the opening. 20 manhwa and 4 videos were shown. Korean media reported that more than 17,000 people visited the exhibition during the four days of the festival.

The Japanese ambassador to France lodged his disappointment with the festival organizers while the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan Fumio Kishida responded at a press conference on 31 January: "It is disappointing that this action does not follow stated goal of deepening international understanding and friendship through comics."

By the time I reached Angouleme on the evening of 31 January, the first shots had already been fired. At the press centre I found a press release by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining their position about the comfort women issue – that the government had already apologized, and letters signed by former Prime Ministers had been sent to former comfort women. An image of one of these letters was included in the 2-page press release (Fig 1). It also mentioned that Japan had set up the Asian Women’s Fund, which provided funds for medical and welfare support to former comfort women, and also “atonement money” amounting to 2 million yen per person. The French and Korean versions of the same press release were found at the press centre the next day.

Taking all these into account, it would seem that the Japanese government has owned up to the comfort women issue since the 1990s. The problem is that while the Japanese government has acknowledged the existence of the comfort women and apologized for their treatment of them, what irked Korea is that conservative Japanese politicians now claim that the women had not been forced into sex slavery, but had been recruited. There was no abduction. This has led to another round of Japan-Korea diplomatic rows for the last few years. Taking it to Angouleme this year was Korea’s way of forcing the issue at an international platform, in a pop medium which Japan has gained much global popularity and success.

Views of the Korean comfort women issue in Japan are not monolith. There are Japanese women activists who fight for the truth to be revealed, not just about comfort women from Korea but the ones from China as well. I met one such Japanese female activist-researcher at a War in Asia international workshop at the University of Essex one month later. The work she does in documenting and exhibiting about the comfort women issue is very inspiring. Unfortunately, only binary views of the issue were shown at Angouleme. It would have been good if there were a general discussion held at Angouleme about the war in Asia and how it was presented/remembered in comics as the war involved not just Japan and Korea, but also China and countries in Southeast Asia. No one made the connection that Zhang Leping’s classic Sanmao strips from the 1930s and 1940s were reprinted in French and launched at Angouleme. A bulk of the strips was about the Chinese war of resistance against the Japanese from 1937 to 1945.

Some people I spoke to at Angouleme were not happy with the fact that while a huge space was given to the Koreans for their version of history (the Korean exhibition was housed on the first floor exhibition hall of the Angouleme Theatre), some Japanese artists who tried to display their manga showing the Japanese version of the comfort women issue was not allowed to at the Little Asia tent (the term Little Asia itself is problematic – why is Asia labeled as little? Is this indicative of an Eurocentric bias?). (Fig 2) I didn’t get the chance to see the controversial manga or talk to the Japanese artists. But it seems to me the crux of the issue is the definitions of politics and culture. Nicolas Pinet, the Angouleme official in charge of Asia was reported as saying, "It is not political to tell people an unknown fact; what is political is to tell people a distorted fact. The South Korean exhibition is art in nature for artists tell their memories and history, whereas the Japanese booth was extremely political in nature. So we had to tear it down."

Edward Said once said the cultural is political. It is difficult to separate the two, so for the festival organizers to differentiate the actions of two quarreling countries is to tread on thin ice. I decided to ask the Koreans about this affair. With the help of Nick Nguyen, a fellow reporter, as the translator, I spoke to one of the curators of the Korean exhibition. Basically, he stuck to his guns: this exhibition was cultural and not political, and the Japanese artists booth at the Little Asia tent was shut down because it was political and not about comics. He was aware of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs press release but as he had not seen it, I gave him and his colleagues a copy of the Korean version. They immediately pored over it. After a while, they said the issue was not about financial repayment to the comfort women. For them, this exhibition was about giving voice to the stories of the comfort women through comics.

It is precisely this point that perplexes me. After viewing the Korean exhibition, I got a sense of what the Korean government wanted me and all the other visitors to learn about the comfort women issue. Most of the comics were commissioned for this exhibition. Only one of the comics had been published before. Other than short narrative stories, there were single panel cartoons, illustrations and animation on display. Interestingly, they were done in a manga style – were the Korean manhwa artists deliberately appropriating the more popular Japanese style and using the ‘enemy’s weapons’ to attack them? (Fig 3)

The stories of the Korean comfort women I ‘hear’ at the exhibition were mediated by the agenda of the government. Some critics at the festival said that the work was didactic. But I was more disturbed by the fact that the ‘true’ voices of the comfort women had been lost. In the narrative of comfort women in Asia, it is often the case that they have not been allowed to ‘grow up’. Even at an old age, they are still stuck in the role of victim, of being comfort women in their youth (Fig 4). They are still being ‘used’ by governments in their countries’ fights with one another. The exhibition has since travelled back to Seoul and was exhibited at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History from March to April 2014. The opening was officiated by the Korean Prime Minister Chung Hongwon.

That is why as much as the Korean comfort women exhibition fits in with the other exhibitions in Angouleme in dealing with the cruelty of war (Tardi, Gus Bofa), I tried not to let it overshadow my overall experience of the festival. In direct contrast to the theme of loss of innocence in the Korean comfort women exhibition, the innocence of Mafalda cheered me up tremendously. This year marked the 50th anniversary of the well-loved character and the Angouleme special exhibition was a trip down memory for many (Fig 5).

I also had the chance to interview Alison Bechdel, whose graphic novel Are You My Mother? was up for a prize at Angouleme (it didn’t win). She felt a bit overwhelmed by the whole media attention, and the schedule of interviews that had been lined up for her. “I don’t know whether I am coming or going,” she deadpanned. The interview before mine asked her if she had seen the latest Wolverine movie. She was still musing on that. (Fig 6)

Bechdel was surprised at how far her book had travelled, been translated and been nominated for an award at Angouleme. To her, Are You My Mother? was an odd book. The earlier book, Fun Home, was more universal. But while there was a story in the sequel, the emphasis was on ideas. “That’s what I love about comics, that it can convey information other than action. It could be an essay…I like to figure out how to create comics that can convey these ideas.

“Fun Home deals with the Oedipus story. It is more straightforward. Are You My Mother? is a pre-Oedipus story, pre-psychoanalysis, before that symbolic organization of language. It is more murky, a less direct story.”

It was also a tougher read, I told her. Bechdel admitted that she felt bad when she had completed the book. But two years on, she felt better about it. “I felt ambivalent about exposing myself and my mother. My mother hated the fact that I was writing about her. This story is basically about how I negotiated the writing of Fun Home with my mother. When I started on that, I had to tell her about it and it was scary. So the main action of Are You My Mother? is the creative time when I was writing Fun Home and dealing with her reactions. It was difficult but it was a great psychiatric growth for me to confront my mother, to go against the rule of my family in making my story public.”

I felt that I had learned more about women issues in my short chat with Bechdel than at the Korean exhibition. It is a pity that this year’s edition of Angouleme has been dominated by political discourse. Such discourse is important but it should not distract us from the comics. Fortunately for some comic artists, they focused on the comics and not nationality. A last run to cover some booths I have not seen led me to the Misma booths. I ran into Takayo Akiyama, a London-based Japanese comic artist I got to know recently and she was showing me her Y-Front Mouse comics published in French by Misma. I asked her about the Korean comfort women controversy. She said she heard about it, but she did not have the time to look at the exhibition as she was manning her booth. She then introduced me to the comics of her booth mate, L’Aventure de l’homme-chien, drawn by Yoon-sun Park, a Korean comic artist based in France. This simple act of camaraderie between a Japanese and a Korean comic artist in that corner of Angouleme reminded us that the festival should be about the comics, and not just politics. In fact, I suspect the two did not even consider their nationality when they draw their comics.

There were many good, historical works that were launched at Angouleme. Of particular interest to me (as someone who has taught modern Chinese history) was the French reissue of Zhang Leping’s Sanmao, a wordless comic strip from the 1930s and 1940s about a young vagabond whose hard life on the streets parallels the story of China, from being bullied by Western capitalism to waging the war of resistance against Japan.

Zhang is one of the pioneers of Chinese cartooning, together with Feng Zikai, Liao Bingxiong, Ding Cong, Hua Junwu, Huang Yao, etc. It is rare for that generation of artists to gain attention in the West. Through the efforts of John Lent and Xu Ying, this journal has published many articles about them. In 2004, I put together a small section of Feng Zikai and Liao Bingxiong’s cartoons in Rosetta Vol 2 (Alternative Comics). In 2009, the Library of Congress and George Mason University organized an exhibition and conference on Ding Cong. The granddaughter of Huang Yao, Carolyn Wong, has continued to promote of his work through the Huang Yao Foundation. Now publisher Xu Ge Fei has worked with Zhang’s son, Zhang Weijun, to release a handsome volume of San Mao cartoons for the French market. I had had the opportunity to chat with Xu and Zhang junior at Angouleme and they shared with me the long process of bringing San Mao to Europe (Fig 7). They were confident that the book would do well in France. Their optimism reminded me of San Mao himself, that little rascal whose indomitable spirit represented hope for China in the 1940s and still does so today.

If comics are supposed to be an international language and medium beyond America, Europe and Japan, then it is important for us to know the past masters of comics and cartoons from different countries. The efforts of companies like Fei Editions in bringing Asian comics to the West should be noted. Overall, this first trip to the Angouleme Comics Festival has been an enriching learning experience and I look forward to attending another one in the near future.

Friday, November 28, 2014

Thanks to Sin Ann, I managed to get in touch with Larry Feign, the famed cartoonist of The World of Lily Wong strip which ran in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s. The American animator was at the right place at the right time, arriving in the former British territory in 1985, at a time when Hong Kongers started to question their fate when HK was to return to China in 1997. This was reflected in the movies like A Better Tomorrow, and the It’s A Mad Mad Mad World series directed by Clifton Ko, which deals with HK people’s obsession to migrate to the West before 1997.

Feign, who is married to a Hong Konger, did not quit HK and stayed on till today, living on Lantau Island with his wife and two daughters. This is despite the fact that his Lily Wong strip was cancelled by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) in 1995, allegedly under pressure from Beijing.

Lily Wong was revived a few years later in time for the handover in 1997 and the strip went on for a few more years. Sadly it is no more and Feign has since gone back to animation and writing.

I used to buy Lily Wong books when I visited HK in the late 1990s and ordered some books from Feign’s website as well. So this is a good opportunity to catch up with an old friend, someone whom I have only met in the funny pages. This interview was conducted over skype on 18 Nov 2014.

The first Lily Wong strip

Q: What is Lily Wong doing now in 2014?
A: To be honest, I don’t know. Lily left HK and went to Australia and I have since lost track of her.
I lived with her day in and out for 15 years or longer. She became very real to me, like another person. I stopped the cartoon in 2001 and a couple of years later, I felt some spirit left me. She’s gone and I don’t intend to bring her back.

You are not the first person to ask me this question. So I don’t know. Her kid, he should be a teenager by now. (Lily was pregnant and gave birth in the story)

The strip stopped 13 years ago. The newspaper which I was contracted to to do the cartoon went out of business. I had nowhere to publish Lily. I could have done it online. In fact, Lily Wong was the second ever daily strip to go online in the 1990s. Dilbert was the first.
Drawing Lily for almost 15 years was a full time job. It took 40 to 60 hours a week to produce the strips. It might sound heartless or awful but I couldn’t continue drawing Lily full time without pay. I had a family to support.

Q: What have you been doing since 2001?
A: I went back to animation production and started an animation business. It was fun for me. I enjoy that, a change from the dying newspaper industry. These days, I work on animation part time. It is commercial work, for websites, etc. My wife is a psychologist, so we are able to support ourselves. The writing does not support me. There are books that I have written that await to be published.

Q: Was there ever an interest to produce a Lily Wong animation?
A: There were earlier attempts in the early 1990s. A local TV station in HK tried that, a short 3 minute cartoon for a variety show. But it was a terrible job. They changed the characters. It was awful, so it was abandoned.

Then there was a movie producer from Japan who actually commissioned me to do a script. They tried to raise money for it, but nothing came out of that.

The most interesting one is from 1991 when a Broadway producer from New York wanted to buy the rights from me. So we negotiated the contract and a script was produced. 15 minutes of full musical treatment. The producer hired an experienced songwriter to write fours songs for it. It was produced on stage in front of investors. But they couldn’t raise the money. So somewhere in the house, I have a terrible handheld video of this 15-minute Lily Wong musical. The actress was a Filipino.

So there were these three attempts.

Q: When did you start drawing cartoons? And why did you stop?
A: I drew cartoons since I was three years old. It was a disease that I just can’t do without. But in 2007, something changed in me. I lost the disease. I do not have the desire to draw or publish cartoons anymore most of the time. But now with the HK protests, for the first time in a long time, I have this desire. But I don’t have an outlet anymore in HK.

So this creative urge has been redirected to writing. Cartooning is a hybrid art. So do you write a cartoon or do you draw one? For me, drawing is the hard part. I don’t enjoy it as much. For others, drawing is second nature to them. Like Bill Waterson. After retirement, he went into painting. Others retired from cartooning to write novels. I went into writing scripts in animation. I oversee the art design but I do not draw.
In 1995, when I was forced to stop the strip by SCMP, there was no outlet for me. I felt physically very bad. Lily Wong was an outlet for me for many years, and now it was shut off and I felt like exploding. But I do not feel that way anymore. I am just focusing on writing. I got pretty good at cartooning, so it’s a shame that I have stopped. But I like what I am doing now.

"Cartoon that got me fired"

Q: What are your views of the recent HK protests?
A: For many years, I was critical of HK young people in the universities. They were only interested in their grades, career and money. But now they have changed. I am ashamed of myself for having such views previously, but I am excited now to see these young people because they care about this place. Whether you agree with them or not is another matter. But this next generation cares and that is good for HK’s future.

I support the developing democracy in HK. I am on their side. I do not agree with all their tactics. They are naïve. But the government is stupid and stubborn, and has many missed chances to make this problem go away. I have been out on the protests. I have seen the political changes in HK for the last 25 years and it is not all good. I am worried.

HK in the 1990s was the most interesting place in the world. It is still a fascinating place to observe this experiment of one country, two systems, which is not seen elsewhere. But I am pessimistic.

Q: How did you end up in HK in 1985?
A: I was working in a LA animation studio in the early 1980s. My wife is from HK and we were both students in Hawaii and we got married there. I was offered a job at Tokyo Disney studios in 1985, but it was a long wait for the paperwork to be done. So we went to HK to visit my wife’s sister. It was strange but I felt no culture clash. I fell in love with the place. There were no animation jobs, but I was asked by a text book publisher to illustrate text books. This was three weeks after I arrived in HK. I had to hire assistants for the project. So I said forget about Disney, I’m staying on.

And the gamble paid off. Two months later, I did some sketches for a daily cartoon. SCMP was not interested, but the Hong Kong Standard was. So it was a dream come true, to have a daily strip within six months of arriving in HK. So I stayed. It was good luck and good timing. I have no regrets.

Q: You have stopped drawing Lily Wong, but you are still selling the collected books online. How are the sales?
A: They are small but steady numbers, especially to Europe. So I have orders from Finland, Germany, Holland. But not so much from America or Canada. I do some have orders from Singapore and Malaysia. The New Straits Times (NST) in Malaysia ran the strip in the 1990s. When the strip was cancelled by SCMP, NST asked if I can continue the strip for them. But they had no budget, so that didn’t happen. NST reran the whole strip again.

It almost ran in The New Paper in Singapore in the 1990s. An assistant editor from America was interested but his editor turned it down. The idea was to relocate the cast of Lily Wong to Singapore and it will become a Singapore strip.

When Lily and family visited Singapore

There is another Singapore connection. In 2001, I went to Singapore for the Asian TV conference. A Singapore government official tried to lure me to move my studio to Singapore. There was to be subsidized rental and guaranteed work visas. Every couple of months, he would call me. I was so tempted. I love the food in Singapore. But my wife is so well established in HK, so that didn’t happen.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Q: How did you get started? (eg. first break and first titles?)
A: I had formal animation and art training at Nanyang Polytechic digital media design. But the big break was when I met CB Celbuski at STGCC 2013. He introduced me to senior editor Nick Lowe, from there he got me to paint covers for a 3 part mini series called No End in Sight, it featured the Uncanny X-Men, Iron Man and Nova. I had lots of fun with it and Nick is just a pleasure to work with. Incredibly sweet guy! No End in Sight should be available as a tpb this November.

Q: Who are your influences?
A: So many! Capcom artists, Bengus, Akiman, Daigo Ikeno. Leinil Yu is a big one, I used to emulate him a lot when I was in school. Now I'm fairly confident to say I've got my own thing going. It's a process and that's what makes it all the more enjoyable as an artist.
Q: How important was it to build a fan base in your own home country first, ie. you were already working on comic titles in your own home country before sending your work overseas?
A: I guess it's always important to create hype. Now it's easier with facebook pages, facebook sharing. Also GNB Comics has been mega kind with letting me use their shop as a point of artist-fan contact. Before Marvel, I was helping one of my favorite creators, Sonny Liew with Liquid City 1 and recently the cover for Liquid City 3.

Q:Do you have an agent?
A: Not at the moment, but I had a really good response from an agent that handles top guys from Marvel. We'll see how that goes!
Q: Pros and cons of working in your home country instead of being based in the West? (eg. Working relationship with writers and editors? More/less opportunities to meet fans and receive feedback?)
A: I think most Marvel Artists are working all over the place. Some in the Philippines, Spain, Mexico to name a few. I'm getting connected to fans, fellow artists easily through the Internet. Comic cons are now a common stable in this region, so opportunities to get feedbacks, reactions is fairly available. The artist has to be active to benefit from all these.

Q: An interesting story that happened to you while working on a title?
A: When my editor briefed me on the 2nd cover of No End in Sight. It was an Iron Man cover. Due to the time difference in New York, I just woke up to read his email and in my half awaken state I read something that was like "Have lasers blasting from Iron Man and him blasting back! More contrast!"
I struggled for the longest time to understand what it meant, I felt I was already going to fail at my second cover. How am I supposed to illustrate Iron Man blasting at himself. Maybe "more contrast!" was the key to understanding everything. At this point I was literally feeling powerless.
Well, I finally realized what an idiot I was. It really read, " Have lasers blasting AT Iron Man and him blasting back.
I had a good laugh at myself.

Q: What are the advantages and/or challenges of being a freelancer?
A: Can't really say, but It's been great for me. Currently I'm a full time Senior Concept Artist at a Local start up with a talented bunch of ex LucasArts crew called BoosterPack. It’s a company that makes games.
So I do the comic stuff after work hours. I'm living in both worlds. My candle is burning but I feel I have plenty of wax to go through. It's the perfect situation for me now.
Q: Do you do comics fulltime or do you have to take on other assignments?
A: When I can. I do sculpting in my free time. I used to hold classes when I was with Lucasfilm Singapore. I'm delighted to announce that I just made my first Toy sculpture with Mighty Jaxx and Sonny Liew. It was a really enjoyable experience. They're awesome and would totally do it again.

Q: Advice for new artists trying to break into the industry?
A: Hard work is always mentioned. Many times a game of chance. To increase these chances I'd like to say remember to stay relevant. Be nice, help your fellow artist. While self educating on art, educate the public when you can. When everyone is better informed it creates more opportunities to move forward, create, share and enjoy better art. Oh and just send your stuff out anyway. Never know who it may reach. Thanks for reading. I'll see you in the funny books!